Monday, August 02, 2010

Proposal: Take the consequences

Procedurally Vetoed. - lilomar

Adminned at 04 Aug 2010 08:57:24 UTC

In Rule 2.2.1 replace “Whenever the High-Programmer makes a blog post, he may assign any number of Commendations and Treason Points to Citizens (with a maximum of one Commendation and one Treason Point per Citizen), in that blog post.” with:

Whenever the High-Programmer makes a blog post, he may assign any number of Commendations and Treason Points to Citizens, in that blog post.

In said Rule replace “If a Citizenâ€™s Treason score is 6 or more, any Citizen with a higher Clearance Level may Terminate them by posting a blog post announcing such an action.” with:

If a Citizenâ€™s Treason score is 6 or more, they or any Citizen with a higher Clearance Level may Terminate them by posting a blog post announcing such an action.

First a little fix. Why should the High Programmer be restricted to assign only one Commendation/Treason Point per Post and Citizen. There is no restriction of making such posts, so if he wants to assign 5 Treason Points, he could do this in 5 Story Posts. Besides, there were Story Posts which tried to assign 2 Treason Points, if I am right?

Second the gist of this proposal: I thought of an automatic death mechanism, but wanted to keep the Clearance idea in said Rule, so I added just the “suicide” mechanism. Generally, if I were the High Programmer, I would terminate each Citizen which at least 6 Treason Points, but of course I am not clever (just RED cleverness) enough to understand the actions done by the High Programmer.

[lilomar] I rather donâ€™t like the dependency on the “mood” of Citizens of higher Clearance Levels to terminate someone. As I stated above, I would also vote for a automatical mechanism, but that would introduce suicides, too.

Well, I know suicides could lead to scams. There has been a dynasty (before my time), where someone won because he died (and being the first in the near of the corpse, if I remember correctly).

But I donâ€™t assume that will happen again, at least not in this dynasty. Clone Numbers are not that important, currently they mean nothing and I donâ€™t expect them to become major part of this dynasty.

There’s a more complicated timing issue here. Suppose (under the current rules) the High Programmer needs to give someone -18 treason points (one at a time, rather than all at once); then it’s in the recipient’s interest to self-promote after the first -6, and again after the next -6. That requires getting into a timing war with the High Programmer, which is not fun and requires staying online continuously trying to check for the timing of their actions. (I would submit a fix for this, but I can’t without it being treasonous; I’m currently trying to work out a fix to allow me to submit a fix for the issue…)

This proposal (the only half of it that works) would introduce the same issue for deaths. Thus .

(Both issues would be fixed if death and promotion moved the Treason counter towards 0 by 6 places, rather than just resetting it to 0, incidentally; that way, the timings wouldn’t matter.)

"Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed."